Cyberpunk

Written on Thursday 27 March 2014

The early years of the twenty-first century.

The boundaries between the real world and the cyber world grow thinner with each passing day. Megacorporations vie for our attention, our clicks, our hearts and minds; their walled gardens are their own private networks in which they suck up our data and sell it to the highest bidder.

In every citizen’s pocket is a communicator, a flat black slab of plastic with immense computational power, which ties them into the ebb and flow of cyberspace around them. Their lives are managed from afar by artificial intelligences living in the vast basements of the Megacorps. “Siri, when is my next appointment?” they ask, and far away, photons flicker in the heart of the vast machinery that will decide how their day will play out.

Some rebel against their devices’ secret corporate agendas, exploiting flaws to rip out their Megacorp guts and replacing them with something knocked up in a tech wizard’s basement — quirky, error-prone, but free.

Cyberspace leaks into the world in other ways too, with the rise of VR for socialising and escapism; with augmented reality overlays built into stratospherically expensive glasses; with always-on Orwellian cameras and microphones in our living rooms, lying dormant until they pick up on trigger phrases like “Xbox, on” or “kill the president”.

The high-tech terminals of the rich are assembled in Asian sweatshops for pennies, and two years later they are out of fashion, shipped back to Asia to be disassembled and stripped for Rare Earth elements in towns thick with carcinogenic smog.

Behind it all, larger battles are fought across the terrain of cyberspace. Shadowy government agencies hack companies and citizens wholesale, tapping into fibre-optic cables and stealing the privacy of nations on their futile quest to defeat a nebulous threat. Other hackers strike back under the pretense of defending the public interest, operating beyond the law and hiding beind digital masks.

Above and beyond them, the world’s militaries fight a shadowy online war of infiltration and sabotage; creating weaponised malware that lies dormant until its time to lay waste to a factory and a nation’s nuclear ambitions.

The year is 2014, and somehow, without realising it, we got exactly the future we were promised.